Something
special

When Samantha McClure opened Small World Travel in Austin, Texas, in 1999, she wanted to focus only on family travel. But a more experienced agent gave her some advice: “You have to be all things to all people,” McClure recalled. “You have to book air, you have to do corporate, you have to do honeymoons.”

Yet, McClure didn’t want to do that. She focused solely on family travel and “never veered from that mission.” Over time, that specialty led to an even more niche specialty: planning long-term family trips, e.g., a yearlong, seven-continents journey. Today, about 25% of McClure’s business comes from those long-term family trips.

She is part of a cadre of agents who have what Kathryn Mazza-Burney, executive vice president of sales for Travelsavers, calls a “micro-specialty.”

Nude travel. Fly-fishing. Luxury rail travel. South Asian destination weddings. Trips for introverts.

Agents run the gamut when it comes to micro-specialties. Some have been narrowing in on their area of expertise for years, while others set out with a micro-specialty in mind and are hyperfocused on it.

“Definitely, there is a trend toward specialization, no question,” said Ignacio Maza, executive vice president of Signature Travel Network. “It’s very, very difficult for you as a travel consultant to stay on top of all the developments around the world across all industries. It’s harder and harder to be a generalist in this day and age.”

Why specialize?

Identifying a microspecialty comes with some distinct advantages, according to Diane Petras, president of the Travel Institute.

“Superspecialization is a very smart choice because it lends itself to superfocused marketing, social media, branding, [search engine optimization] supplier relationships, consulting and amenities,” Petras said. “If your superspecialization represents your passion and has a following that travels, then it stands to reason it would be wildly successful in today’s world of virtual offices and global connectivity.”

There is a distinct correlation between specialization and success, according to consortia executives. Roger Block, president of Travel Leaders Network, said agents with specialties are fulfilling consumer needs. In turn, agents are finding new clients.

“It’s extremely important to the consumer to be able to find somebody who really is knowledgeable about what they have in mind more than just broad generalities,” he said.

Block said an agent knowledgeable in a specific specialty engenders trust in consumers and potential clients. He cited a member specializing in Australia whose close rate on product there is up to 60%, “simply because he is so passionate about Australia. He can demonstrate his specialization in Australia.”

Agents are also using more advanced tools from their consortia affiliations to market specializations, making it less challenging to connect with potential clients than it was four to five years ago, according to Travel Leaders Network vice president Perry Lungmus. For example, its Agent Profiler tool, an online profile for lead generation, has evolved to highlight an agent’s specializations to help them stand out.

Block said the internet has facilitated specialization. “At the end of the day, without the internet, this whole concept of this type of specialization would never be possible,” he said, adding that the internet has also given agents much greater international reach.

Jennifer Campbell, managing director of professional development and agency services at Virtuoso, began to see agents shifting from being generalists to specialists about 15 years ago. Then, about five years ago, superspecialization really began to gain momentum.

“I think that’s because society demands this hyperpersonalization,” she said.

Signature’s Maza posited that “as the world becomes more complex, and as we are flooded with information and news, … it is very, very hard for you to know everything about everywhere. And kind of by default, people are narrowing their field.”

Offering a microspecialty is also a point of differentiation, Mazza-Burney said.

“There are not many out there, and they become that go-to person to the consumers,” she said. “That’s what they’re recognized as, and that’s what they’re looking for. They don’t want to compete with everybody else out there for that same customer.”

That’s what has helped agencies like Fly Water Travel in Ashland, Ore., to succeed while specializing in travel for fly fishermen.

“People really have a reason to call us,” said co-owner Brian Gies. “Whereas, if we were a general travel agency, obviously you’d have way more options of what you could potentially sell to somebody, but people don’t also have a reason to call you.” (Fly Water Travel was the subject of an Agent Life profile in the July 30 issue, “Agency’s success with fly-fishing lures investor.”)

Finding a niche vs. starting one

Some agents have been in their specialty for years, including Donna Daniels, owner of Fox Travel in Spring, Texas. She and her husband, James Bailey, now specialize in nudist travel, but they didn’t always.

In the travel industry since 1980, Daniels became the owner of Fox in 1984 but didn’t officially start selling nudist travel until around 1991. They recognized an opportunity after Bailey started moderating a nude-travel discussion board online, sharing expertise garnered from their own travels.

“The thing that was consistent throughout all the responses,” Daniels said, “was, ‘Oh, you’ve been there? I can’t find anybody who’s been there.’”

Today, they run multiple group trips each year and charter two cruises, a Princess ship in the spring and a Royal Caribbean ship in the winter. It has blossomed into a lucrative expertise for them.

McClure, too, honed in on her specialty after starting out in family travel in 1999. About 15 years ago, a family hired her to plan their around-the-world trip, and thanks to word of mouth and referrals, that facet of her business bloomed. While she usually only takes on one long-term family trip per year, she’s currently planning three.

Today, McClure said, she encourages new agents to specialize right off the bat.

“I just think specializing is a great way to start your business, … deciding what you love and what you don’t love and really sticking to it,” she said. “It will bring you more business and bring you more joy and make you more successful.”

That’s the tactic Jacob Marek embraces. Marek is the founder of Denver-based IntroverTravels. In business for two years, he focuses on trip planning for people who, like himself, identify as introverts, emphasizing nature, culture and history.

In fact, his focus was even more narrow when he first started: “life-changing, nature-inspired travel experiences for introverts.” But Marek admits that might have been too specific to work out. Instead, by simply focusing on introverts, he has found what he calls his “goldilocks zone.”

Some agents found themselves in the right place at the right time, among them Jill Jergel with Frontiers International Travel in Gibsonia, Pa.

Jergel has been an agent since 1978. Today, she specializes in barge cruising in France, which she estimated makes up between 50% and 70% of her business. (She also does custom itineraries for trips to France that don’t include barge clients.)

She got involved in barge cruising in 1983, when a barge owner, the late Gerard Morgan-Grenville, approached Frontiers about marketing his barge. Jergel cruised on it, and she’s been selling barge cruises ever since.

“I happened to be in the right place at the right time, truly, but I recognized pretty quickly that this was going to be something that would really catch on,” she said.

Turning business away

In some cases, microspecialists are so uniquely focused on their niche that they turn away all other requests. That’s been the case with some Signature members, Maza said, and they’ve been very successful in doing so. (He said they refer leads to other Signature members.)

“It’s definitely happening,” he said. “Many of our members and individual consultants, focus, narrow their field.”

Some agents are also choosing to specialize in their clients. They keep a small roster of clients that they get to know very well, developing a relationship like a client might have with a financial planner.

“They’re not trying to cast a very wide net and have hundreds of new customers,” Maza said. “They really are trying to capture a larger scale of the travel spending of a narrower number of clients by knowing so much about their clients.”

Marek is an agent who carefully curates his client base.

“Drip by drip, I’m trying to fill up my glass full of the right repeat clients,” he said.

He is more than willing to pass clients on to other agents. For example, he said, “I don’t touch Disney with a 10-foot pole.” He passes those requests to a Disney specialist.

Other agencies, like Adventure Travel in Lawton, Okla., use a niche to supplement their general business.

Adventure Travel has a contract with the Army to arrange travel from Fort Sill in Lawton to soldiers’ homes for Christmas. President Hossein Moini said that means getting about six weeks starting in November to arrange travel for 3,000 to 3,500 troops.

It’s a challenge, he admitted, but it also accounts for 20% of his overall business.

Ellen Paderson, CEO of Smiles and Miles Travel in Bourne, Mass., also sells general leisure travel, but she has developed a microspecialty in destination bar and bat mitzvahs that now accounts for around 30% of her business. They also usually result in repeat travelers.

“Once they do the bar mitzvah, they’re pretty much clients for life,” Paderson said. “That’s opened up more business in other areas.”

‘Sell what you love’

Agents almost unanimously agreed that a microspecialty has to stem from a personal passion.

In recent years, Virtuoso has introduced a number of Communities, in which member agents and preferred suppliers can engage with each other and network around specific interests (e.g., wellness and adventure travel). Campbell said agents who participate in Communities sell 72% more of supplier members than other agents.

“I think some of that’s fed by it being a passion,” she said. “I mean, it’s so much easier to sell what you love and what you have interest in.”

Marek agreed.

“I would just tell people to have the courage to find a niche and to be authentic to themselves, because that will come across to your clients as well,” Marek said.

“If you’re picking a niche just because you think it’s profitable or trendy, or if you read about it in trade publications or in the news or whatever, just because it’s the trend du jour doesn’t mean that you should follow it. If you’re not interested in something, then how the hell can you get excited to sell it to somebody else?”

Patience can also be key in developing a microspecialty, according to Moini.

“Sometimes you just need to hang around for a while,” he said.

“The first year or two, we were kind of questioning whether [the Army contract] was a good move for us, but things got better as we got better.”

Webinars alone don’t cut it

Another thing successful microspecialists have in common is experience.

Eleanor Flagler Hardy is president of the Society of International Railway Travelers based in Louisville, Ky. She runs it with her husband, founder and CEO Owen Hardy.

Their focus on luxury rail travel grew out of experience, Eleanor Hardy said. Before starting the agency, she and her husband published a magazine about modern rail travel. That eventually led them to sell rail trips, and they and their agents still experience the products they sell firsthand.

“You’ve got to go to these places,” she said. “You have to experience what you’re going to turn around to sell to somebody. You can’t base your business on web-inars.”

The agency tests everything it sells to clients, including airport transfers and hotels.

It’s expensive, she admitted, but “it’s an investment in your business.”

Mini Badacha, Bains Travel’s manager of Eastern Canada out of Mississauga, Ontario, agreed that knowledge is crucial for superspecialists. Badacha’s specialty is destination weddings in South Asia.

“When the call comes in and you’re talking to prospects, you already have that knowledge,” she said. “You can tell them, ‘Hey, I’ve done a wedding here,’ or ‘I’ve been to this resort, and they have so many venues where you could hold the ceremony,’ and so on and so forth.”

She added: “No matter which area you want to focus on, you need to be an expert.”

Generalists: a dying breed?

Specializing has taken center stage in recent years, and microspecialists have taken it a step further. But it begs the question: Are generalists a dying breed in the agency community? Thus far, the resounding answer is no.

It’s a matter of scale, Block said.

“The number of customers who go to a seven-day Caribbean cruise and Mexico and Florida, just the number of passengers, it’s in the millions,” he said. “Whereas the number of people who want to go to an art museum for pottery throughout Europe is probably in the thousands.”

Campbell agreed that generalists won’t be pushed out by specialists. Instead, she argued that the trend of specialization will actually probably strengthen generalists’ businesses.

“If I’m focusing on wellness travel or river cruises, and I don’t want to do these other things, then there’s going to be plenty of room for someone who does want to do all of those things,” she said.

Maza likened generalist agents to general practitioners.

“Ten years from now, are we still going to have general practitioners? Yes,” he said. “But are people going to need specialists, a good ear, nose and throat doctor, a good gastroenterologist? No question. And be willing to pay a premium for that? No question.”